Trish Ferguson
Thomas Hardy’s legal fictions
Edinburgh University Press (Series: Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture), Edinburgh, 2013, ix, 178 pp.
ISBN: 9780748673247
This book examines how Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving definition of legal insanity, the campaign for legal equality for married women and heightened discussion over land law reform. This book situates Hardy’s treatment of these issues in the context of debate in Parliament, the press, periodicals and sensation fiction. While noting the influence of sensation fiction on his literary output this study argues that Hardy rejects the conventional endings of realist and sensation fiction to provoke his readership to examine legal questions which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning.
Contents
– Introduction
– ‘If you only knew me through and through’: the domestic trial scene and narrative advocacy
– ‘I was not in my senses, and a man’s senses are himself’: the legal defence of insanity
– ‘I hate to be thought men’s property in that way’: married women and the law — ‘Waiters on chance’ : the Tichborne claimant, land law reform and rural dispossession
– Conclusion
– Bibliography
– Index.
Trish Ferguson studied English Studies as an undergraduate at Trinity College where she also completed her PhD in 2008. Her research and teaching interests are the literature of Thomas Hardy, the interdisciplinary study of literature and the law, sensation fiction and fin de siècle literature. She co-organized the interdisciplinary Victorian Time conference held by the TCD School of English in April 2010.
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De Trish Ferguson, y relacionados con Thomas Hardy, merecen anotarse sus trabajos ‘Trial and Error in Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions”, en Thomas Hardy Journal 24 (2008), pp. 91-105, y ‘Memoirs and Recollections’, Thomas Hardy in Context, Phillip Mallett (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2103, isbn: 9780521196482).
Thomas Hardy . c. 1913-1914
Y es lo cierto que sobre Hardy han ido apareciendo en los últimos años diversos estudios en obras colectivas, de las que este blog ha hecho seguimiento. Así, el cap. 2 [A Comparative Reading of Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1892)] en la obra de Juli L. Parker, Representations of Murderous Women in Literature, Theatre, Film, and Television: Examining the Patriarchal Presuppositions Behind the Treatment of Murderesses in Fiction and Reality, Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, Lewiston, New York, 2011. También en Kristin Kalsem, In contempt: nineteenth-century women, law, and literature, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 2012, donde se ocupa de ‘Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895)’, o lo abordado por Amanda Claybaugh (‘Jude the Obscure: The Irrelevance of Marriage Law’) en Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison LaCroix (eds.), Subversion and sympathy: gender, law, and the British novel, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013.
Es con todo precursor el estudio de William A. Davis (Professor of English. College of Notre Dame of Maryland), Thomas Hardy and the law: legal presences in Hardy’s life and fiction, London, University of Delaware Press. Associated University Presses, 2003, 199 pp. (ISBN: 9780874137985).
Contens
1. Hardy’s Interest in the Law
Hardy’s Legal Research
Hardy’s Legal Friendships
Hardy the Magistrate
The Law and Hardy’s Fiction
2. Bad Beginnings and Good Plots: Marriage Laws, Sham
Marriage, and Assault
Marriage Laws and Plot in Hardy’s Novels
Sham Marriage, Criminal Law, and Tess
The Rape of Tess: Hardy, the Law, and the Plot of Tess
3. Things Fall Apart: Marital Desertion, Wife Sale, and
Woman-Taming
Desertion
Wife Sale and the Justice Plot
Woman-Taming
4. «Prescribed by law»: Hardy, the Divorce Question, and
the Purposes of Fiction
Matrimonial Cruelty: The Case of The Woodlanders
The Adultery Ground: Legal Naivete and Collusion in Tess
of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure
The Public Nature of Divorce: Hardy, the «Crawford-
Dilke» Case, and Jude the Obscure
5. The Evolution of the Law in Hardy’s Fiction
From Good Solicitors to Dangerous Imposters:
Representatives of the Law in Hardy’s Novels
From Naive Heroines to Savvy Divorcees: The Acquisition
of Legal Knowledge in the Novels
From Justice to «Justice» and «Tragic Machinery»: The
Eroding Sense of the Law
From Reliance on the Law to the Call for Legal Reform:
Hardy’s Use of the Law in the Early and Later
Novels
Los lectores de habla hispana tendrán oportunidad de comprobar las intrincadas problemáticas de las divergencias matrimoniales, además del sustrato de los conflictos clase social y otros como la división de la propiedad de la tierra y algunos artificios contractuales relacionados con la cesión del dominio a los cultivadores y arrendatarios, en la novela de Hardy que con el título de Los habitantes del bosque recientemente se publicó en España por traducción de Roberto Frías (Impedimenta, Madrid, 2013, 452 pp. ISBN: 9788415130444) que va ya –si no me equivoco– por la 4ª o 5ª edición.
Un buena oportunidad de acopio para lecturas de este verano inmediato.
J.C.G.
